Topical items and views on the impact of digitisation on publishing and its content and the issues that make the news. This blog follows the report 'Brave New World',
(http://www.ewidgetsonline.com/vcil/bravenewworld.html ), published by the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland and authored by Martyn Daniels. The views and comments expressed are those of the author.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

BIC 2012: Rethinking The Future

This is a presentation i gave to the BIC New Trends Seminar 2012 on 20th June in London.

The
one thing that is certain about tomorrow is that it will be different to today
and anyone who says that they have a clear and defined long term digital strategy
is someone to be avoided and treated with healthy scepticism. We can all spend
too long looking backwards to spot trends, But the future is not a linear
journey. Trends merely tell us where we have been, not our destination.
However, history teaches us that much is cyclic and what comes around goes
around albeit differently. Change as we have all witnessed, can and will be,
very disruptive and there will be many digital ‘black swans’ moving forward.

Richard
Charkin recently said that publishers need to now think and act as start-ups,
which is a hairy prospect for many and will not suit all.

I
believe that the future is often born out of understanding the past,
recognising what is different and identifying the enablers that make change
happen and for us to do things smarter.

Today,
I want to share 3 stories that help present just one perspective of the future.
These are merely three stories which weave together to present just one argument.
Just one piece in tomorrow’s digital jigsaw.

The first story is about
finding needles in haystacks

A
couple of years ago I found myself in Ludlow market looking at a pile of old
books. I bought three, two by the same author and one featuring an artist I
admired. The first two were cloth bound and published in the late 1930s by
Country Life and the author went on to be; an author, artist, environmentalist,
TV personality and wildlife campaigner. I wanted to share with others; the art,
the wildlife, the environmental perspectives, and their insight into life in a
bygone age and of course the man himself.

I
started to think about reprinting them. I established the direct market potential,
the audience and was confident it was viable as a quality two volume collector’s
slipcase edition and so I started to research the rights to the works. However,
tracking the rights to 80 year old works quickly became a challenge. Eventually
with the help of friend, who is somewhat of an expert in orphan and public
rights, we tracked down the estate’s owner and there the issue sits today. The
exercise proved that even with a well know author and clear publication history,
tracking down rights, be they orphans or just old works, can be a testing
exercise.

Imagine
tracking down a less notorious author’s work from even 50, 40, or even 30 years
ago?

I
was one of the first to stand up against the audious Google Book Settlement. My
opposition was and remains primarily over the proposed ‘land grab’ or adoption of
orphan works. Does my quest to adopt an orphan damper my opposition, or push me
towards the ‘nationalisation’ of orphans or mass digitisation some propose
today? The answer remains no.

Thinking
about a rights business reminds me that some ten years ago I was invited by the
BBC to attend a special conference on their future. It was to be attended by
all senior figures from the Director General down.

On
the day I found myself joined by a group of what appeared to be students and
teenagers complete with street clothing and undaunted by their surroundings. I
felt somewhat out of place and wondering what on earth was happening. We were
ushered into a room and ask to sit on tables with senior BBC executives. After
a couple of speeches the most illuminating dialogue started around each table.
It was all about technology, software, games, gadgets, viral events and the
latest things, some of which I had never heard of. It was about how the BBC
should engage and what they should do next. The BBC learnt a lot from that
exercise. Interestingly the BBC was starting to recognise that they weren’t so much
in the broadcasting business as in the content and rights business.

That
fundamental realisation has helped them shape their BBC Worldwide commercial
arm and changed much of what and how they work today.

Publishing,
be it; music, film, games, books, is about content and rights. It is a rights
business from acquisition, development to trading. Yet it is somewhat ironic
that we remain wedded to rights terms which would appear to be inappropriate to
the digital world, stuck in the print world. We find ourselves now moving in
that digital environment without a rights registry.

It’s
like going into combat today with First World War technology – it’s plain
just dumb.

The
one thing Google would have at least given us was a registry and without one some
would suggest that we are flying blind in the eye of a digital storm.

The second story is about
that extraordinary man Charles Dickens

A
couple of months ago I visited the Dickens exhibition at the London Museum. What
is interesting is that Dickens lived through the great literacy revolution
where the masses were able to read and his penny fiction was a way of feeding
their new habit in a digestible form. Dickens was many things not just a writer
of great novels. Dickens was a performer, a journalist, a letter writer, a pamphleteer,
a theatre producer and a self publicist extraordinaire.

He
not only wrote many works by the chapter, he also delivered them as ongoing
works. He used the ‘penny press’ to presale the stories by instalment. In 1837 he
was selling some 50,000 copies of his Pickwick periodicals at a shilling a
time. These contained one chapter sandwiched between pages of adverts. Many of
these adverts had little to do with books or even the subject matter of the
story. In fact the adverts demonstrate the diversity of the audience. The
journals appeared either weekly or monthly and given the number of chapters and
volume of sales, plus the advertising revenues, should have earned him a good
return. It is claimed that when Great Expectations was published in weekly
instalment in 1861 it had weekly sales of some 100,000 units a week.
Interestingly they didn’t diminish his book appeal but fuelled interest in the
finally work.

The
Victorian engineering, transport and communications revolution of Dickens’ time
was, on reflection, as great as that we have today with our technology and
communications revolution. The new railways, telegraph and postal services
enabled him to travel extensively and communicate to a wide audience and between
1858 and 1870 he gave some 472 readings of his works in the UK and US.

In Victorian times the novel was often also enhanced by illustrations. Dicken’s
‘Sketches by Boz’ was illustrated by George Cruikshank and as with many Dickens
tales the reader was able to picture both in words and in imagery the story as
it unfolded. Today, we have often lost the imagery of yesterday, but does the
new ebook now enable us to once again enhance and illustrate the book?

It is not hard to see the relevance of Dickens to today and why it is somewhat
ironic that 2012 is the 200th celebration of his birth.

Some
have adopted the short story and instalment model and Keita digital novels continue
to be a huge success in Japan. In the West Stephen King and others have also
ventured down the digital short story and instalment route. But why hasn’t a
publisher grabbed this digital opportunity by the throat? Are we stuck in the economic
75,000 words, 256 page format of the print rendition?

When
we have done digital short stories, we have even bound them into digital collections.
It’s as if we missed the iTunes moment when singles were reborn. We continue to
ignore the shortening attention span and channel hopping culture in which we
live.

Has
the publishing and editorial process got in the way of the instalment and short
story?

Short
stories and instalments may also unlock further the democratisation of writing.
Some would suggest that they may have greater potential for consumer engagement
than the enhancing today’s somewhat stretched physical content model with digital
media for media’s sake.

If
we want more people to read then give them something exciting that they can
quickly appreciate and value.

The third story is about the
creation and development itself - the publishing front office.

In
the late 90s as part of the research programme ‘publishing in the 21st
Century’ , Mark Bide, Mike Shatzkin , JohnWicker and myself went to HarperCollins in Manhattan. We were doing
research into the digitisation of the publishing front office and the objective
was to look at an Editorial system that they were using.The system looked impressive and acted as we
would expect but I felt there was something not right about it. A few questions
later and what appeared to be a good system was turning into a dog.

To
cut a long story short it was built like a transactional system and not as a
content one. It lacked that intuitive feel needed by creative people. What
workflow that did exist was ridged. Editors were being asked to enter other people’s
information for little perceived benefit to them. The final blow was that a
number of Editors had refused to use the system.

I remember
saying, ‘if the customer service clerk refused to use the system you sack them,
if the editor refuses to use the system you sack the system.’

Have
we moved on in the last decade?

Well
the answer is yes and no. Systems have been adopted but the divide between
content and context and transactional information still exists. People still
see production systems as often financial and transactional and somewhat
divorced from the content. Marketing, promotional and bibliographic information
is still often in parallel silos and not drawn directly from the content
itself. There is still a gulf between content and transactional information.

This
is not true in some sectors, such as education, where the complexity of the
works and digital has demanded better tools. However when you look at others
such as the development of some academic monographs, you can see huge
opportunities for radical improvement which are not being taken today.

I would ask you to consider
that the argument that these three stories give us is that tomorrow will be heavily
influenced and shaped just as much by the changes that will happen upstream in we
acquire, develop, repurpose, store, curate, and market content and rights as it
will be downstream in how the promote, sell, distribute and trade them. It is about understanding and getting back to the
basics, what has worked in the past, what could work tomorrow, adapting and
understanding the total environment.

Digital
is not just about pouring physical books into digital containers. If we think
that is what it is about we have missed the plot.

There
are many pieces to the digital jigsaw and there is no one piece that fits all.

To
date we have been digitally obsessed with devices, DRM and formats. Thankfully
these are now relatively irrelevant and yesterday’s issues

·Devices are evolving into platforms, content is becoming
agnostic, and finally moving to being cloud based on demand

·DRM is at last past its sell by date. But before we all run
out and drop DRM it it is worth thinking about rights and permission,
collective commons registration, and the ‘first sale doctrine’ . Some would
suggest that not to do so may be as short sighted as when we got rid of the NBA
without thinking about returns

We do
have some exciting challenges downstream, such as:

·working out what the difference between ebooks and apps and
associated usage rights

·moving from outright sales models to new models, which most
probably will be subscription and rental based

·redefining and creating tomorrow’s libraries

·exploiting the rapidly evolving social networking environment
and helping readers find a digital needle in a digital haystack, or as it is
now called ‘discoverability’

·working out how we audit the sales ‘honesty box’ environment
we have created

Returning to basics.

There
are only two people that count in the value chain – the author, creator who
puts in the IP and the consumer who puts in the cash. Everyone in between adds
cost, but more than ever has to add value. Digital publishing isn’t just about
the downstream activity and the consumer it is about the life cycle of content,
context and rights from Author to reader.

I
believe that the argument I have presented today can present one piece to
tomorrow’s jigsaw and new opportunities which themselves could be significant
and impact the downstream market, provide long overdue development productivity
and rights governance and, may even offer a opportunity that doesn’t just
cannibalise existing print but can compliment it.

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About Me

Before entering publishing I worked for many years as a Senior Executive in blue chip organisations in the retail, oil and automotive sectors. My publishing induction was initially as Director of Strategic Development at VISTA. There I was responsible for, and a contributor to, their highly acclaimed ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ research series, the primary creator behind publishing services PubEasy and ‘batch.co.uk’, the initiator of the development of new Front Office systems to support publishers. In 2006 I joined Value Chain International(VCIL) initially as VP Marketing, Media and Publishing before becoming their President in 2009. In July 2011 the company's operations were acquired by Syncordia. I hold two non executive positions with publishing industry players Bibliophile Ltd and Haven Group and currently setting up Read Petite a service focused on providing digital short form material online via subscription.
Email mdaniels@opus57.co.uk